Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World by Patricia Akhimie Nat Cutter Akhimie, Patricia, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Routledge Studies in Shakespeare, 29), New York and Abingdon, Routledge, 2018; hardback; pp. 219; 14 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £115.00; ISBN: 9780815356431. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference presents a refreshing and insightful look into the intersections of class, conduct, race, and oppression in the early modern period, placing the works of William Shakespeare in dialogue with sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century conduct manuals. The key argument and contribution of the work concerns the central position of the body and its somatic markings as both a sign and symptom of character traits, social status, and potential in early modern thought. The high status concepts of 'conduct' and 'cultivation', Patricia Akhimie argues, comprise both the controllable, external characteristics of behaviour, dress, and education, but also embodied somatic markings. Access to the ability to improve one's own status through cultivation and conduct depended upon the absence of stigmatized bodily traits, even if those bodily marks were themselves imposed or acquired from outside forces, since even natural features have negative meanings constructed by dominant cultural powers. For Akhimie, the unusual and challenging situations into which playwrights place their characters provide an ideal location for the boundaries of these social divisions to be revealed, tested, and lampooned. Othello, Shakespeare's quintessential foreigner confronting racial prejudice, is treated through the lens of treatises on the 'art of travel', exposing how his blackness and foreignness become connected to his individual character flaws. This confirms that foreigners, while interesting to visit and potentially instructive for travellers, are fundamentally dangerous and prone to contagious corruption, and cannot reliably participate in the norms of Christian socioeconomic life. Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus from The Comedy of Errors are marked with undifferentiated status by their similar physical features as twins, showing the ease with which individuals with similar bodies are conflated. Increasingly, however, they are rendered into homogeneous inferiors through their repeated beatings, domestic advice manuals drawing a direct line between servile status, the act of physical discipline, and the bruises and stripes left by this treatment, and vice versa, such that these marks become just and reasonable brandings of social class. A Midsummer Night's Dream considered alongside hunting instructions offers an insight into the contrasts between the upper classes, who are bodily suited to higher mental responsibilities and thus require the mental recreation of leisure (enacted through performatively elaborate hunts and entertainments), and the working-class rude mechanicals, whose rough manual-labouring hands are [End Page 179] evidence of unsophisticated minds, rendering their external, acquired differences into immutable and inherent traits. Finally, Caliban is explored with husbandry texts, whereby his upbringing under Prospero becomes a 'cultivation': first as that of a son, with nurturing and education, and then after Caliban's attempted rape of Miranda, through torment and deprivation, as that of a disobedient beast. Prospero's treatment in his attempts to control and harness his servant leaves visible 'pinch' marks on Caliban's body and further exaggerates his monstrous appearance, such that the Algerian witch's son can never be redeemed, despite his evident knowledge and mastery of the island he once ruled. Though these plays highlight the norms of social difference, they also emphasize the dissatisfaction of those marginalized, 'social climbers' like Iago and Caliban who resent their exclusion from access to advancement, or 'honest strivers' like Othello and the Dromios who lament their unjust treatment. In this book, Akhimie makes pioneering use of conduct manuals to bring together multiple categories of social difference under one unifying theory of somatic markings and external conduct. Using classic racial texts Othello and The Tempest alongside new readings of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Comedy of Errors, Akhimie brings together the 'imbricated' stigmas associated with differences of race and class. She highlights clearly both the normative and contested nature of the stigmas and social pathways explored in the book. Akhimie's work promises to be of broad value in many settings, but particularly where...